Sylvie Kinigi, Prime Minister of Burundi

From Reuters, 23 December 1994

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuter) - The appointment of
Africa's first woman vice-president has focused attention on why so few
African women enter politics and only a much smaller minority reach high
office.

Two recent international meetings__the U.N.
Population Conference in Cairo in September and the Fifth African
Regional Conference on Women in Senegal last month__put women's
liberation and empowerment at the forefront of their concerns. But both
took place on the world's poorest continent, where women are stifled by
cultural and sexual taboos. No one expects the conferences to provoke
rapid change.

"Women politicians in Africa have to
fight prejudices in society and an environment not conducive to
success," said Maria Nzomo, a Nairobi University senior lecturer in
political science.

"The idea that women are less capable has long
been in society. They face also increasingly more hardship as they lack
enough funds," she said, noting that traditionally African women are
barred from owning property.

Beset by poverty__sub-Saharan Africa has the world's
highest number of people under the international poverty line__women
are well aware of the host of hurdles to a political life.

Many say they are forced to toe the party line of their male opposite
numbers who wheel and deal in the political arena, while women take a
socially accepted backseat as merely token leaders.

On
being named Uganda's and Africa's first woman vice- president last
month, Specioze Wandira Kazibwe said "women in Uganda should know that
privileges accorded to us by government will have to go with
responsibilities ...I am ready to show my worth."

Kazibwe retained her previous position of minister of gender (women's)
community development, a rare portfolio in Africa.

Male
newspaper commentators in Uganda's capital Kampala praised President
Yoweri Museveni's decision to appoint Kazibwe, saying he had sewn up the
woman's vote for elections next year.

"At campaigns, women
are jeered at and depicted as frustrated divorcees in politics as a last
resort. African women don't like to vote or study politics," said
politics student Mary Mwangi.

"Men feel you will steal
the political spotlight and because we are so few they throw mud and
slander us," said Agnes Ndetei, a parliamentarian and the foremost
woman in Kenya's opposition.

"But none of us have defected (to
the ruling KANU party) because we believe in what we are doing," she
added.

Lip service to equality is increasingly paid by leaders
in Africa because of increased solidarity among women demanding a
greater say in the continent, but gains are few and far between.

Tanzania's founding president Julius Nyerere was embarrassed this
month as chairman of a two-day conference in Nairobi on Africa's
political and economic agenda for the year 2000 when a woman complained
to him about the handful of women present.

Conference
organizers, asked by Nyerere to explain, said more women had been
invited but many had failed to turn up.

Women's
development and progress in politics received a hard blow in April with
the killing of Rwanda's Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who fought
to end to women's oppression in the tiny central African state.

Uwilingiyimana, 41, entered politics in 1992 shortly after
then President Juvenal Habyarimana bowed to the wind of change sweeping
across Africa and allowed multi-party politics.

A
dynamic, shrewd woman who preached tribal tolerance in a nation where
ethnic allegiance is seen as all-important, she led a tough fight
against women being depicted as the weak sex who should be shunted out
of public service.

At a political rally in the capital
Kigali, Habyarimana singled out his prime minister by shouting: "You,
woman!"

Only the second African
woman to serve as a prime minister, Uwilingiyimana was slaughtered by
members of the presidential guard on April 6 despite being under the
escort of U.N. guards.

The three-month bloodbath that
followed the assassination of Habyarimana killed up to one million
people across Rwanda.

In neighboring Burundi, Sylvie
Kinigi was appointed prime minister only on the eve of the killing of
President Melchior Ndadaye by renegade Tutsi troops in October last
year.

Diplomats said she reluctantly accepted the post
as she had felt she could achieve more by remaining the civil service
head in charge of economic planning in the prime minister's office.

An elegant, soft-spoken but straight-talking 41-year-old,
Kinigi abandoned her political life when her cabinet collapsed last
February and now works for Burundi's Commercial Bank. "I am not outside
of politics but I have left the political scene," Kinigi told Reuters.